The subject matter relates in general to telephone call processing, and relates more particularly to forwarding unanswered incoming telephone calls to voicemail.
Voicemail messaging is a service offered by many telecommunications providers. In a typical example of a voicemail message service, the service determines whether a called number subscribing to that service is busy or otherwise unavailable to receive an incoming call. If the called number is busy, for example, the typical voicemail service returns a recorded message to the caller instead of completing the call to the called number. The voicemail announcement, which may have been previously recorded by the voicemail-service subscriber, usually includes an invitation for the caller to speak a brief audio message, which the voicemail service records for later electronic delivery to the voicemail subscriber. Voicemail messaging services thus offer subscribers a distinct advantage over the conventional telephone answering machine connected to a single subscriber line, which cannot respond to an incoming call while that line is busy.
When a voicemail subscriber (or user of a subscriber's device) receives an incoming call to an idle subscriber line, the telecommunications provider typically rolls over that call to the voicemail system after sending the subscriber line a predetermined number of ring cycles. Typical voicemail for residential customers is set so that the phone rings four times before the incoming call goes to voicemail. That number of rings is a tradeoff of several factors, hoping to give the customer a reasonable time to answer the phone but recognizing that some callers may lack the patience to wait for more ringing cycles before the call is answered or goes to voicemail. Whatever the number of ringing cycles set for a particular voicemail service, a subscriber unable to answer a ringing phone by that number will miss the call, which has gone to voicemail. That subscriber must wait for the voicemail service to finish recording the caller's message, and then contact the voicemail service to receive that message. Even if the subscriber's voicemail messaging service offers the option to increase the number of ringing cycles before rolling over to voicemail, using that option may subject the subscriber to longer ringing cycles for unwanted calls and may annoy or confuse callers who must wait while their calls go unanswered or unforwarded to voicemail.